INFLUENCE OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA ON CHILDREN’S SOCIALIZATION

ABSTRACT

A number of studies suggest that the amount of early screen media exposure is related to negative developmental outcomes, namely poorer executive functioning and language skills Television’s constant presence in the home could lead to potentially serious consequences for infants and toddlers. However, hypotheses attributing long-term negative outcomes to the direct effects of television on children are limited. There are no definitive mechanisms to explain how these effects are instantiated within children over time. Furthermore, the indirect influences of television on children remain entirely unexplored. Television’s impact can have a potentially greater indirect effect on young children by directly influencing parents’ behaviors, which in turn, disrupt the quality of their interactions with their children. As a result, the current longitudinal study investigated the impact of infant television exposure on later cognitive and learning outcomes at age 6 to 9 years of age to assess whether parent-child interactions mediate this association. Results indicated that parent engagement and parent language during infancy did not mediate this relationship between early television exposure and children’s later cognitive skills. Rather, the amount of co-viewing television during infancy directly and negatively predicted later school-age children’s working memory skills, academic abilities, and language outcomes.

1.2 Statement of the Problem
Timing of internet usage has been freed from any limits, it is now can be used at any time of a day and the user can choose his/her own time and place. The spread of the so-known “Internet Café” has a strong effect on the increasing use of the internet by adolescents and youth; and by the limited-income people who cannot afford buying a computer or paying monthly for the internet providers, which was, at its beginnings, more expensive than now. The internet does not only imply benefits and advantages, it is also as a means for transmitting the globalizations can imply a lot of negatives and disadvantages. There is a consensus among researchers that modern communication technology, the internet in the first place, has opened a new era of communication and interaction among human beings, and indefinite availability of information and knowledge for users. On the other hand, there are fears of the negative effects: physical, psychological, social, cultural effects caused by the over excessive of the internet. There is high increase in the rate of research and academic focus on the issues and topics of the internet in general, and particularly, the virtual social and community networks since the emergence of the information virtual space accompanying the appearance of the internet, and its production of many virtual groups, beside its availability for millions of human beings.